the way out of the mind*: a case against sylvia plath in three parts
This is mainly for my own perverse satisfaction, but it has been a long time coming. A very, very long time coming.
Hello, flist. Allow me to introduce to you the veritable bane of my literary existence.
Sylvia Plath Hughes.
There she is, in the 1960s equivalent of a myspace picture. Look how sad she is about her life. Bawww, Sylvia, bawww.
I can’t remember when I encountered Plath and her work for the first time. However I am fairly certain that my hatred for her came to the forefront of my awareness sometime during the course of my high school career. To be fair that’s about the same time I came to dislike reading in general, but there is certainly no other writer for whom I hold such a deep aversion.
Here is why.
i. the poet herself
During her life the woman made a career (and after her death others have subsequently made for her something like a legacy) in the practice of chaining up, ball-gagging, whipping, and generally raping the art of poetry. Her use of language is appalling, as is her technique. She is one of those writers who uses the medium to confuse and alienate (invariably in the hopes of inflating one's ego) rather than to express and communicate. In reading her poems I have noticed a tendency to throw in ten million dollar words and entirely preposterous metaphors. I'm sure she thought that made her brilliant but all it accomplishes to my perception is to frustrate, if not infuriate, the reader. Why should we waste our time to try to figure out what in the world she's saying, well because that is certainly what she would want. She wants us to be confused by her, to draw the conclusion that she must be so terribly deep and talented and that is surely why we fail to understand her.
One of the more irritating aspects of Plath as a poet and indeed as an individual is this - in layman's terms, the bitch is never happy. She writes this poem of nonsensical rage against her father (the infamous Daddy, oh yes, you know what I mean), comparing the poor German zoologist to a Nazi and a vampire, hating him for dying of diabetes. Of course the loss of a parent is one marked by profound grief and anguish, but who is she to resent him so much for succumbing to a natural disease when at the age of thirty she abandoned her two small children by committing suicide, a conscious act. A bit hypocritical, don’t you think, if only for the fact that she knew what it was like to grow up saddling the heavy absence of a parent.
Also, a note about her suicide relevant to the fact that the bitch is never happy. We all know she stuck her head in an oven. Everyone defends her by saying that she stuck towels under the door to the children’s room and left them something to eat and drink. Clearly that makes her a good mother, right? Yes, so when someone who has no idea that Plath is a crazy bitch comes into the room and flicks on the light switch the whole place can go up in an explosion. Plath clearly never thought of anyone but herself, how put upon she perceived herself to be.
Another tiny little note about Daddy. In that sorry excuse for a “poem” not only does Ms. Plath go after her father, but she also makes it a point to harp on her husband also. Admittedly they had recently separated at the time the poem was written, but honestly? I would have left her too. (Yes, I'm one of those Horrible People who sides with Hughes, and yes, I know everything about Assia you would want to tell me.)
Plath has become a cult figure through no virtue of her own. The bulk of her work reads like a tome of the ramblings of a madwoman, which is precisely was she was. The events of her life speak for themselves - her (miserably failed) suicide attempt at the age of 20, her unjustified rage towards her father especially in juxtaposition to her hypocritical suicide, her claiming to hate her mother despite their close relationship, her pathological need for attention through any means possible, her suicide that is often regarded as a gesture that accidentally worked. If you ask me it was in ways merciful if only because it put an end to the ridiculous spectacle of her life, an end to her preposterous word salad, her poetry vomit.
Then there’s the fact that Plath’s son just committed suicide in March of this year. Nicholas Hughes had his own merit aside from the stigma of being Plath’s son. He was a biologist and a professor, an expert on fish, particularly king salmon. He was deprived of his mother at barely a year old and now the poor man has killed himself as well and it’s still all about her almost half a century later.
ii. plath's work as a reflection of the poet
A large part of what allows me to detest the woman as much as I do is the combined effects of thinking not only is her poetry horrible, but likewise the thoughts behind them are contemptable. I believe that art in its purest and most unadulterated form is the expression of self, and from this philosophy we can draw the assumption that the art is a rather accurate representation of the artist.
While I could write on any number of deep character flaws that are glaringly apparent in her poetry, I will explore her complete failure to understand what it is to be a mother. The woman's treatment of her children, both in interaction and in her work, is reprehensible.
This is another area in which she is never content. We'll begin with her characteristic self-pity, her constant concern with how all things affect her, and from there progress in the severity of her maternal failure.
Metaphors is generally accepted to be about pregnancy. She refers to herself as "a means, a stage," suggesting that she resents the child for putting her on the back burner, so to speak, in terms of importance. This is an idea that is revisited in many poems, perhaps most clearly in Morning Song.
(I swear I’ve written this same explication at least ten times in various English classes, but this is the one that I will keep and reference as long as I shall live.) Morning Song was written after the birth of Plath's first child, her daughter Frieda. In the first stanza her attitude becomes clear as she describe how the child's "bald cry / Took its place among the elements." Her sarcasm here shows her displeasure with the infant, that she is unimpressed with her, and Plath's unnatural detachment only grows more apparent in the lines that follow.
She refers to her daughter as a "new statue," while describing her and her husband's function as merely to "stand round blankly as walls." This depiction suggests that she resents the child for absorbing attention, detracting from the parents, Plath in particular. She is what we call nowadays an attention whore, and an incurable one at that.
The most horrific part of this poem is in the following stanza. It speaks for itself - "I'm no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind's hand." This is the definitive example of her detachment and lack of any feeling for the child aside from resentment. The cloud and mirror metaphor is Plath's way of holding her daughter's youth and potential against her, of lamenting the aging process in comparison to the life the child has ahead of her. There's old Sylvia, always thinking of herself.
In the fifth stanza Plath gives us this line - "One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral." Again her bitterness towards her daughter indelibly shines though. My theory is that she is annoyed that anything could possibly be more important than her, much less her daughter, a younger manifestation of herself that will only grow into loveliness while Plath withers, grows old (a theme she addresses in Gigolo, alongside her incurable narcissism), is forgotten as her daughter grows older.
Apparently no one ever told Plath that this is the natural order of things, but then, knowing her, perhaps she thought that she was far more important than time, reproduction, the natural aging process that surely it held no dominion over her.
After her daughter was born Plath had a miscarriage, the subject for her poem Parliament Hill Fields. She laments that this happened but I almost question what right she has. Her suicide aside, observe her attitude towards her two other children in her poetry. Her concern for herself and abnormal resentment towards her children do not fit with her sadness over this event in her life, but this contradiction certainly makes sense when we remember that Plath is at all times desperate for attention. Here something has happened, an event devestating in any normal person's mind, and Plath uses it as just another means of gathering attention for herself.
At this point to continue in the vein of demonstrating through Plath's own words what a self-centred, pitiful excuse for a mother she was is certainly superfluous, yet allow me to conclude this train of thought by pointing out how she speaks for herself in her poem Fearful - "The thought of a baby--- / Stealer of cells, stealer of beauty---". There is her perception of children in a line. Her attitude towards them is much like the wicked stepmother in Snow White, only instead of poisoning apples Plath chooses to compose verse vilifying her children so that there is a permanent record of her selfish disregard for the importance of being a mother. I defy anyone to defend her to any legitimate extent.
iii. in conclusion
As I stated before, there is no other writer for whom I hold more disdain than the above pictured Sylvia Plath. In fact, I doubt that any other figure, whether literary, historical, or political, will ever be able to elicit from me the reaction that she does. What is this reaction? It is one of mingled disgust, consternation, and offence. Disgust at her self-importance and willful disregard for others, consternation that one possessed of such little talent as herself was able to rise to a place of some significance in the literary world, and offence that her propensity for self-indulgence has been extended beyond her own lifetime.
I notice a lamentable tendency lately in literary society. I suspect it has been going on longer than I have been alive, perhaps since the dawn of literature itself, at least as long as it has been mulled over by critics. Of late I have interpretated the system behind deeming works of literature "good" or not is often based upon said works of literature's capacity to be unfathomable, that is to say, how well the work can hide its secrets, or at least play at having a secret buried somewhere deep within it. In plainer terms, critics seem to prize the ability of literature, poetry in particular, to be arcane, rather than to encapsulate some facet of the human experience and make it accessible. This is the elitist attitude deplorably present among the literary Powers that Be across the different movements present in the history of the written word.
In the movement with which Plath is associated, the Confessional movement in poetry, this is only made worse. Poetry is admittedly a very personal art form, perhaps more so than any other - it provides an arena that begs the deepest and most private thoughts and ideas of the writer, opens up the inherent "ness" of the poet and makes his or her inner workings suddenly very viewable and open to the judgment of others. Most artists are, unquestionably and perhaps due to the dependence of art upon drawing from the self, rather self-absorbed. A degree of this is perhaps permissable, but in Plath it is heinous, a lurid spectacle. She is caught in the same predicament in which most teenage girls find themselves - stuck between inexplicably low self-esteem and the inherent force within everyone that cries out for the realisation of one's own interests and the stroking of one's ego; an overgrown survival instinct. Most adolescent girls find themselves, and once that is done, from there find a way onward to a more balanced state of being. This is often referred to as the process of "growing up." Plath, clearly, never did this.
Sylvia Plath committed suicide, itself likely an inadvertantly effective attempt to draw attention to herself, over 46 years ago. To this day her followers continue to cater to her truly remarkable and pitiful need for attention. They read her work, idealise her, make her into some entirely put upon darling in the process of demonising everyone involved in her life who are surely to blame for the unbelievable agony of her life. We, of course, know better.
Plath through her poems may well have aimed to confess some of her most personal thoughts, and if they were comprehensible maybe we could learn from them. Instead Plath would rather push us away, make us wonder what in the world she is blathering on about, hopes that in our lack of understanding we will regard her as a deity among poets, truly too far ahead of her time for our comprehension. Sadly for her, her attempt at bigotry falls entirely flat. All that remains of Plath is this - her attempted high-brow, often unintelligible drivel we refer to as her poetry, a contemptible life marked by mostly self-inflicted dramas, and the misfortune we have that her name, her words were not lost forever to the passage of time as they deserve.
*taken from Sylvia's own piteous question, "Is there no way out of the mind?" and the obvious answer that clearly there is, because the crazy bitch certainly appears to have found it.
Hello, flist. Allow me to introduce to you the veritable bane of my literary existence.
Sylvia Plath Hughes.
There she is, in the 1960s equivalent of a myspace picture. Look how sad she is about her life. Bawww, Sylvia, bawww.
I can’t remember when I encountered Plath and her work for the first time. However I am fairly certain that my hatred for her came to the forefront of my awareness sometime during the course of my high school career. To be fair that’s about the same time I came to dislike reading in general, but there is certainly no other writer for whom I hold such a deep aversion.
Here is why.
i. the poet herself
During her life the woman made a career (and after her death others have subsequently made for her something like a legacy) in the practice of chaining up, ball-gagging, whipping, and generally raping the art of poetry. Her use of language is appalling, as is her technique. She is one of those writers who uses the medium to confuse and alienate (invariably in the hopes of inflating one's ego) rather than to express and communicate. In reading her poems I have noticed a tendency to throw in ten million dollar words and entirely preposterous metaphors. I'm sure she thought that made her brilliant but all it accomplishes to my perception is to frustrate, if not infuriate, the reader. Why should we waste our time to try to figure out what in the world she's saying, well because that is certainly what she would want. She wants us to be confused by her, to draw the conclusion that she must be so terribly deep and talented and that is surely why we fail to understand her.
One of the more irritating aspects of Plath as a poet and indeed as an individual is this - in layman's terms, the bitch is never happy. She writes this poem of nonsensical rage against her father (the infamous Daddy, oh yes, you know what I mean), comparing the poor German zoologist to a Nazi and a vampire, hating him for dying of diabetes. Of course the loss of a parent is one marked by profound grief and anguish, but who is she to resent him so much for succumbing to a natural disease when at the age of thirty she abandoned her two small children by committing suicide, a conscious act. A bit hypocritical, don’t you think, if only for the fact that she knew what it was like to grow up saddling the heavy absence of a parent.
Also, a note about her suicide relevant to the fact that the bitch is never happy. We all know she stuck her head in an oven. Everyone defends her by saying that she stuck towels under the door to the children’s room and left them something to eat and drink. Clearly that makes her a good mother, right? Yes, so when someone who has no idea that Plath is a crazy bitch comes into the room and flicks on the light switch the whole place can go up in an explosion. Plath clearly never thought of anyone but herself, how put upon she perceived herself to be.
Another tiny little note about Daddy. In that sorry excuse for a “poem” not only does Ms. Plath go after her father, but she also makes it a point to harp on her husband also. Admittedly they had recently separated at the time the poem was written, but honestly? I would have left her too. (Yes, I'm one of those Horrible People who sides with Hughes, and yes, I know everything about Assia you would want to tell me.)
Plath has become a cult figure through no virtue of her own. The bulk of her work reads like a tome of the ramblings of a madwoman, which is precisely was she was. The events of her life speak for themselves - her (miserably failed) suicide attempt at the age of 20, her unjustified rage towards her father especially in juxtaposition to her hypocritical suicide, her claiming to hate her mother despite their close relationship, her pathological need for attention through any means possible, her suicide that is often regarded as a gesture that accidentally worked. If you ask me it was in ways merciful if only because it put an end to the ridiculous spectacle of her life, an end to her preposterous word salad, her poetry vomit.
Then there’s the fact that Plath’s son just committed suicide in March of this year. Nicholas Hughes had his own merit aside from the stigma of being Plath’s son. He was a biologist and a professor, an expert on fish, particularly king salmon. He was deprived of his mother at barely a year old and now the poor man has killed himself as well and it’s still all about her almost half a century later.
ii. plath's work as a reflection of the poet
A large part of what allows me to detest the woman as much as I do is the combined effects of thinking not only is her poetry horrible, but likewise the thoughts behind them are contemptable. I believe that art in its purest and most unadulterated form is the expression of self, and from this philosophy we can draw the assumption that the art is a rather accurate representation of the artist.
While I could write on any number of deep character flaws that are glaringly apparent in her poetry, I will explore her complete failure to understand what it is to be a mother. The woman's treatment of her children, both in interaction and in her work, is reprehensible.
This is another area in which she is never content. We'll begin with her characteristic self-pity, her constant concern with how all things affect her, and from there progress in the severity of her maternal failure.
Metaphors is generally accepted to be about pregnancy. She refers to herself as "a means, a stage," suggesting that she resents the child for putting her on the back burner, so to speak, in terms of importance. This is an idea that is revisited in many poems, perhaps most clearly in Morning Song.
(I swear I’ve written this same explication at least ten times in various English classes, but this is the one that I will keep and reference as long as I shall live.) Morning Song was written after the birth of Plath's first child, her daughter Frieda. In the first stanza her attitude becomes clear as she describe how the child's "bald cry / Took its place among the elements." Her sarcasm here shows her displeasure with the infant, that she is unimpressed with her, and Plath's unnatural detachment only grows more apparent in the lines that follow.
She refers to her daughter as a "new statue," while describing her and her husband's function as merely to "stand round blankly as walls." This depiction suggests that she resents the child for absorbing attention, detracting from the parents, Plath in particular. She is what we call nowadays an attention whore, and an incurable one at that.
The most horrific part of this poem is in the following stanza. It speaks for itself - "I'm no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind's hand." This is the definitive example of her detachment and lack of any feeling for the child aside from resentment. The cloud and mirror metaphor is Plath's way of holding her daughter's youth and potential against her, of lamenting the aging process in comparison to the life the child has ahead of her. There's old Sylvia, always thinking of herself.
In the fifth stanza Plath gives us this line - "One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral." Again her bitterness towards her daughter indelibly shines though. My theory is that she is annoyed that anything could possibly be more important than her, much less her daughter, a younger manifestation of herself that will only grow into loveliness while Plath withers, grows old (a theme she addresses in Gigolo, alongside her incurable narcissism), is forgotten as her daughter grows older.
Apparently no one ever told Plath that this is the natural order of things, but then, knowing her, perhaps she thought that she was far more important than time, reproduction, the natural aging process that surely it held no dominion over her.
After her daughter was born Plath had a miscarriage, the subject for her poem Parliament Hill Fields. She laments that this happened but I almost question what right she has. Her suicide aside, observe her attitude towards her two other children in her poetry. Her concern for herself and abnormal resentment towards her children do not fit with her sadness over this event in her life, but this contradiction certainly makes sense when we remember that Plath is at all times desperate for attention. Here something has happened, an event devestating in any normal person's mind, and Plath uses it as just another means of gathering attention for herself.
At this point to continue in the vein of demonstrating through Plath's own words what a self-centred, pitiful excuse for a mother she was is certainly superfluous, yet allow me to conclude this train of thought by pointing out how she speaks for herself in her poem Fearful - "The thought of a baby--- / Stealer of cells, stealer of beauty---". There is her perception of children in a line. Her attitude towards them is much like the wicked stepmother in Snow White, only instead of poisoning apples Plath chooses to compose verse vilifying her children so that there is a permanent record of her selfish disregard for the importance of being a mother. I defy anyone to defend her to any legitimate extent.
iii. in conclusion
As I stated before, there is no other writer for whom I hold more disdain than the above pictured Sylvia Plath. In fact, I doubt that any other figure, whether literary, historical, or political, will ever be able to elicit from me the reaction that she does. What is this reaction? It is one of mingled disgust, consternation, and offence. Disgust at her self-importance and willful disregard for others, consternation that one possessed of such little talent as herself was able to rise to a place of some significance in the literary world, and offence that her propensity for self-indulgence has been extended beyond her own lifetime.
I notice a lamentable tendency lately in literary society. I suspect it has been going on longer than I have been alive, perhaps since the dawn of literature itself, at least as long as it has been mulled over by critics. Of late I have interpretated the system behind deeming works of literature "good" or not is often based upon said works of literature's capacity to be unfathomable, that is to say, how well the work can hide its secrets, or at least play at having a secret buried somewhere deep within it. In plainer terms, critics seem to prize the ability of literature, poetry in particular, to be arcane, rather than to encapsulate some facet of the human experience and make it accessible. This is the elitist attitude deplorably present among the literary Powers that Be across the different movements present in the history of the written word.
In the movement with which Plath is associated, the Confessional movement in poetry, this is only made worse. Poetry is admittedly a very personal art form, perhaps more so than any other - it provides an arena that begs the deepest and most private thoughts and ideas of the writer, opens up the inherent "ness" of the poet and makes his or her inner workings suddenly very viewable and open to the judgment of others. Most artists are, unquestionably and perhaps due to the dependence of art upon drawing from the self, rather self-absorbed. A degree of this is perhaps permissable, but in Plath it is heinous, a lurid spectacle. She is caught in the same predicament in which most teenage girls find themselves - stuck between inexplicably low self-esteem and the inherent force within everyone that cries out for the realisation of one's own interests and the stroking of one's ego; an overgrown survival instinct. Most adolescent girls find themselves, and once that is done, from there find a way onward to a more balanced state of being. This is often referred to as the process of "growing up." Plath, clearly, never did this.
Sylvia Plath committed suicide, itself likely an inadvertantly effective attempt to draw attention to herself, over 46 years ago. To this day her followers continue to cater to her truly remarkable and pitiful need for attention. They read her work, idealise her, make her into some entirely put upon darling in the process of demonising everyone involved in her life who are surely to blame for the unbelievable agony of her life. We, of course, know better.
Plath through her poems may well have aimed to confess some of her most personal thoughts, and if they were comprehensible maybe we could learn from them. Instead Plath would rather push us away, make us wonder what in the world she is blathering on about, hopes that in our lack of understanding we will regard her as a deity among poets, truly too far ahead of her time for our comprehension. Sadly for her, her attempt at bigotry falls entirely flat. All that remains of Plath is this - her attempted high-brow, often unintelligible drivel we refer to as her poetry, a contemptible life marked by mostly self-inflicted dramas, and the misfortune we have that her name, her words were not lost forever to the passage of time as they deserve.
*taken from Sylvia's own piteous question, "Is there no way out of the mind?" and the obvious answer that clearly there is, because the crazy bitch certainly appears to have found it.